Air Force Supported Research Professor Listed in "50 Things That Will Make You Say Wow" in the August Issue of Oprah Magazine

  • Published
  • By Robert P. White, Ph.D.
  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
ARLINGTON --  Dr. Jennifer Dionne, an Assistant Professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University was chosen as a recipient of a prestigious Young Investigator's Program (YIP) award by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2011. Since that time her research group has been investigating metamaterials, to include their fundamental electrodynamic properties and applications to solar energy and bioimaging. The Dionne Group is especially interested in designing new materials with optical and electrical properties not accessible in nature and applying those materials to problems of global significance.

Part of the group's specialization, though, is in visible-frequency negative index materials; and this is what landed her at the number 24 spot in the article's listing. As the Oprah narrative highlight states: "Jennifer Dionne....knows how to make small items like a penny or a coffee cup disappear." Dionne explained this attribute of metamaterials thusly: "We're now able to steer light around an object and have it emerge on the other side as if it never interacted with the object -- making it appear invisible", adding that a life-size, Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak is "definitely possible".

The technical aspects of this phenomenon, also known by some as transformation optics, are explained in Dionne's latest paper on broadband negative index material in the most recent issue of Advanced Optical Materials, where she explains how she arrives at "a broadband metamaterial presenting negative indices across hundreds of nanometers in the visible and near-infrared spectral regimes by using transformative optics to design the metamaterial constituents." Theoretically, this results in, "negative refractive indices at optical frequencies in multiple regions exceeding 200 nm in bandwidth," which, "...illustrate the power of transformation optics for new metamaterial designs and provide a foundation for future broadband metamaterial devices."

Dr. Dionne noted that the group's metamaterials research, "...wouldn't be possible without the AFOSR YIP grant....AFOSR basic research played a critical role in enabling this work!" Dr. Gernot Pomrenke, the AFOSR Program Officer overseeing Dionne's work, states that this program has the potential to make significant contributions to the Air Force mission, by developing a new analytic and synthetic framework for visible-frequency metamaterial device design and developing materials with novel properties not found in nature. The results will dramatically enhance the processability, dimensionality, and bandwidth of metamaterials, yielding new nanophotonic devices and new imaging concepts.

The Air Force (and the readers of Oprah Magazine), will doubtless be hearing more about Dr. Dionne in the near future.